Tom Schulman

1989 was the year of Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" and Steven Soderbergh's "sex, lies and videotape" and Oscar was supposed to pay homage to independent films, yet Tom Schulman won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for "Dead Poet's Society" and even the most vocal supporters of the indie world kept mum. It was also Schulman's first feature film, although that same year he co-wrote (with Ed Naha) the highly successful family film "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." The latter was an amiable comedy about an inventor who creates a machine that accidentally reduces his and a neighbor's children. "Dead Poet's Society" starred Robin Williams as an iconoclastic instructor at a boarding school who inspires his students but also creates frustration in one of them, leading to tragic consequences.